


if we grow too close

by KathrynShadow



Category: DCU (Comics), Super Sons (Comics)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Aged-Up Character(s), C-PTSD, Canonical Child Abuse, Confessions, Consequences of Super Senses, Emotional Baggage, Kidnapping, M/M, Overthinking, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rescuing Each Other, Talia is the worst okay, or more specific warnings rather, this was supposed to be a oneshot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-02
Updated: 2018-05-27
Packaged: 2019-04-17 04:09:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 16,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14180271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KathrynShadow/pseuds/KathrynShadow
Summary: He’s—as careful as he knows how to be. Not killing someone is, comparatively, easy to track. How can Damian know he’s not manipulating someone unless his actions are as cold, as flatly featureless as they possibly can be? How many times did Talia trick him into staying his hand by feigning pain? How many times did she redirect him away from his wandering wants by showing hurt at his potential rejection? Displays are a bid for control whether he means them to be or not. (Emotions are a weapon, and he leaves his weapons sheathed until they’re absolutely necessary these days.)





	1. and I'm preparing for a burial at sea

**Author's Note:**

> THE WARNINGS ARE HERE!
> 
> A'ight. There is a brief internal monologue about a canonical past rape and grooming as a hypothetical concept. Explanations below this, but the TL;DR: I didn't go into particular detail (since Damian wasn't there for the first thing and the second thing is obviously not actually happening); however, if you still want to avoid it, I'll mark the beginning and end of the problem segment with some asterisks. Let me know if that isn't enough or if I missed something.
> 
> THE EXPLANATION, IF YOU'RE ON THE FENCE:  
> It was just... made pretty damn clear that, no matter what Bruce's relationship with Talia was, Damian wasn't something she even discussed with him. I personally consider "making a test tube baby without your consent" to be a more extreme version of birth control sabotage; and, depending on the source material (since there are inconsistencies between comics even in what relatively little I've read, not to mention the reboots), at least one panel implies that Bruce wasn't exactly in full control of his faculties at the time.
> 
> Damian, being a paranoid creature, is INCREDIBLY WORRIED that he will take after his mother in this particular regard and somehow, without meaning to, take advantage of Jon somehow.
> 
> That is all. Stay safe out there <3

Damian falls in love at some point.

He knows this. He’s always known this. As much as the others in the family like to poke fun at the… gaps in his emotional understanding, he isn’t a fool.

He just doesn’t do anything about it.

* * *

Jon’s super hearing always had less range than his father’s. Damian originally chalked it up to Jon’s half-human state; honestly, it was borderline ridiculous that he had a power set at all, let alone a predictable one, let alone one that ran even _close_ to Superman’s.

And then, a few months after he hits fourteen, it abruptly runs closer. He calls Damian in a panic one evening, barely waits for a response before mumbling something impressively vague about needing to “go” and asking Damian to cover for him at school, and then Jon vanishes off the face of the planet.

Well. That’s not entirely accurate. He’s sighted _everywhere_ on the planet, in rapid succession—fires, attempted homicides, robberies, active warzones—never staying long, just checking to make sure everyone was okay and immediately flying off again. There’s a report of a sonic boom when he takes off at one point: something that, to Damian’s knowledge, had been outside his abilities. If he’d gone that fast before, it hadn’t been around Robin.

Damian allowed him two days. He covered for Jon, as requested, making up something about the flu; some of the other students remarked that they’d never seen him sick before, but thankfully they just took it as a particularly nasty strain or perhaps Jon’s luck simply running out. Jon’s parents run with the story, too, from what Damian can tell; so clearly they aren’t concerned.

 _“I did something similar when I was Jon’s age,”_ Damian overhears Superman telling Batman one evening. It’s not League business, or a Gotham threat big enough to warrant a Kryptonian (or, more accurately, to scare Batman into calling one in). The older Kent sounds tired, but not worried. _“He’ll figure out how to control it. It just takes time.”_

Time is not a luxury that Damian allows.

 _“If there’s any way I can help, let me know,”_ Batman’s voice comes after, muted in a way that the soft echo of the Cave doesn’t completely explain.

Kent’s laugh sounds sadder than it ought to. _“If I can think of anything, I will.”_

As if they’re all meant to just sit and wait around while Jon… does whatever it is he’s doing.

* * *

_When_ is much more difficult to pin down than _what._ Consciously, he knows that there must have been some sort of tipping point, some sort of divide between _best friend_ (not quite only, Todd, there _is_ Maya) and…

(“Crush” is juvenile. “Beloved” implies mutuality, and more specifically discussion.)

But wherever it is, he can’t look back and find it. It feels as though it’s just something that’s _true,_ that the moment he came to see Jon as a partner he saw him as a friend, and the moment he saw him as a friend he saw him as something _other._ (Not more. Never more. That’s an oversimplification to Jon and an insult to everyone else.) But that isn’t the answer; they were both of them children when they met, and the two and a half years’ difference had felt like an impassable gulf of age and experience at ten and thirteen. This connection is not eternal—at least, not in that direction.

He knew the beginning of it in short order. He loved his family; he loved Maya in the same fashion. Jon fell out of that system altogether, refused to be confined and cataloged along the same lines that Damian was used to. Perhaps that was just what friendship was.

(He dragged Jon, powerless and unconscious and already taller than him, out of the ocean; and for all he had the diving mask over his nose and mouth, he doesn’t think he took a single breath until he saw Jon cough his first one out on the submarine floor.)

Damian tries not to encourage it, but he doesn’t exactly stop it from happening, either. Regardless of whether his esteem is mutual, or could be, or whether it would be a good thing if it were, his friendship with Jon certainly is—and while Damian could still hurt him, _would_ if it became necessary for his safety or happiness, he finds that he doesn’t have it in him to be cruel unless Jon’s life is at stake if he isn’t. Which doesn’t have a tendency to happen.

So. They’re friends. Damian makes a show of grumbling about it, because he does still have something of a reputation to uphold, but he spends as much time with Jon as he does with anyone else who doesn’t live with him. And that’s… that’s okay. It’s good.

* * *

Jon isn’t an easy person to track down when he’s darting around like this. As far as Damian can tell (and he runs through every cross-reference he can think of, compares every piece of data against everything it might even think about lining up with) there’s nothing; just a rapid, weaving path around the planet, seeking out trouble and throwing himself headlong into the middle of it. But, Damian considers, perhaps that in and of itself _is_ the pattern.

Superman did something similar. Jon needs to learn how to control ‘it’, but if everything were out of control, there would be far more destruction than there is. He _is_ controlled, as perfectly as anyone could hope for—a little sloppy, but not in a way that gets anyone hurt.

The sight had been one of the first things to sort itself out, and even Superman can’t _see_ something happening across an entire ocean. He hears it, if he’s paying attention…

...or if he doesn’t know how _not_ to.

It takes Jon a week of nonstop fighting for all of it to catch up with him. Early on Saturday morning, he crashes facefirst into the Pacific; when he does, Damian is there. So is Superman, but he just stands—hovers—back, lets Damian scoop his only child into the amphibian plane.

“I’m going to help him,” Damian says over the sound of the waves, defiant. Jon shifts behind him, his absurd jacket squelching on the floor, but he doesn’t get up.

Superman inhales slowly. “He’ll have to learn to control his hearing on his own,” he says, and Damian tenses for a fight, but the elder Kryptonian keeps going. “It’ll help if he has something to focus on. Something… simple, and predictable, that he’s familiar enough with to pick up at a distance.”

Robin blinks behind his mask, but doesn’t otherwise move. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he says.

Superman gives him a small smile. It looks like the one Jon gets when everything’s going wrong but he isn’t quite sure what other facial expression he ought to be using. “Thank you, Robin.”

The plane hisses shut and sinks beneath the waves. Superman turns and shoots across the sky, the same direction Jon was heading when he crashed.

Damian puts the craft on autopilot and redirects his attention back to his sodden cargo, tense as he kneels at Jon’s side and checks him over as best as he can.

He’s uninjured. His powers haven’t given out, or he would have started drowning, but he’s—exhausted. He stirs when Robin checks his pulse (slow, a little uneven, but strong), but doesn’t seem to have the energy to get up.

“I have to,” he mumbles, trying anyway. And he’s… when Damian moves a hand to Jon’s chest to convince him it’s better to stay down, he pushes back with a little less than the strength of a normal thirteen-year-old. Jon doesn’t bother concealing his strength around Damian except to keep from hurting him, so he must be a little weaker—but it’s impossible to tell whether his strength is _gone_ or if his sense of it is just off-kilter enough that he thinks this is the proper amount of pressure to apply. Robin frowns.

“Your father’s taking care of it,” he says, fingers splayed over Jon’s sternum. “You need to rest.”

Jon goes still, but doesn’t exactly relax. (He’s shivering, just a little. Definitely weaker.) “Too many things at once,” he insists, almost under his breath. “I need to help, Dami, _please_ —”

Exhausted, half delusional with it; too tired to resist, but trying anyway. They won’t get anywhere with him like this. Robin observes Jon’s state, takes a stab in the dark about how many of his powers he even still has; if this backfires, how much damage it will cause. “Do you trust me?” he asks, hand moving back up, pretending to check his friend’s pulse again.

“Yeah,” Superboy says (instantly, thoughtlessly, like it’s nothing).

“Go to sleep,” Damian says, pressing his fingers down on either side of Jon’s trachea and choking him out.

(And, for all his protests earlier, Jon must realize that there’s a reason for this—because his face switches from desperate to confused but not to _afraid,_ and his titanium-crushing hands don’t even reach up for a token scrabbling resistance. Every cell in Robin’s body hurts with it, even more than they would have if Jon _had_ fought back.)

Even a normal human wouldn’t stay down for long enough to get back to their base, let alone one who was also half-Kryptonian—but it does take down his ability to resist his own exhaustion. He’s been running on nothing but a pathological need to help people, but that only has any effect when he’s conscious.

Jon sleeps the rest of the way to the base, and he barely stirs when Damian heaves him over his shoulder. It would, of course, be easier if Superboy were conscious and able to walk on his own, especially given his irritating habit of getting steadily taller than Damian every single year, but it’s hardly the _first_ time he’s had to dredge the other boy out of the ocean and carry him somewhere. The main difficulty just lies in keeping his limbs from flopping into every single wall, doorframe and shelf the whole way there.

Robin doesn’t drop him on the bed at first, instead propping him up against it and moving on to snag a couple of towels and an extra blanket, just in case. He returns, dropping the lot by Jon’s legs, and proceeds on the several-minute journey of wrangling the soggy jacket off of his friend, wrapping one of the towels around the t-shirt beneath; Jon without his shirt on is (unfortunately) not something he’s never seen before, but it feels like there’s a difference between seeing to his injuries while he’s awake and trying not to puke his guts out from kryptonite exposure, and choking him into unconsciousness before taking his shirt off and tucking him into bed. Survival, health, versus comfort; and even if Jon wouldn’t care, even if there really is nothing to worry about, Damian can’t shake the feeling that it’s a line he shouldn’t cross. So; just the absurd jacket, and then his sneakers and sopping socks. Robin does his best to cocoon Jon’s legs in the other towel (he’s willing to wash the salt water from the sheets, not from the entire bed) before pulling him up into the lower bunk, covering him in blankets, and stepping back. Jon helpfully does his part and sleeps.

But not restfully. Damian frowns down at him as he crouches at his side, brushes the salt-scented hair from his forehead (in case it’s annoying him, he reasons, tickling him awake). He has less of a reason for his fingertips lingering on the edge of Jon’s scalp, so he gets to his feet and walks away.

Robin recalibrates the sunlamps in the base to run red instead of yellow, turns them on low, and keeps vigil in the hour before the tension finally fades out and Jon’s face slackens into real slumber.

Draining the rest of his powers isn’t a solution, but it’s better than nothing at all.

* * *

 ***

* * *

The difference in their ages nags at him (he knows he lets himself get closer in the seven months out of the year they’re only two years apart instead of three, feels himself pulling away the other five; he knows it’s irrational, but somehow that doesn’t help). So does his past—it was one of the hardest things he’d had to accept as a child, that his parents would always hate each other, that he’d never have a family that was whole and healthy and just _loved_ each other like they were supposed to; it was even worse when he realized that he understood where his father was coming from. Talia had bred Damian as a tool, without Bruce’s knowledge or input, and then she had thrown him away as soon as he completely defied his original path. Perhaps the last had been a temporary insanity, perhaps she had gained part of herself back after her latest death, but. But. But.

It doesn’t erase what she did. It doesn’t erase what Damian is, and it doesn’t erase what he is terrified that he could be capable of.

He's shaken off so much of the al Ghul legacy but it's impossible to forget it's there, crawling between his bones and whispering. It's gotten better over the years in his father's care and his siblings’ nonchalantly unconditional bond, but the first thought in his head whenever he touches someone is still _here, dig in/twist/push, this is how you kill them._ Those particular intrusions are meaningless around Jon—the only reason he's even close to comfortable with how damn _demonstrative_ Kent can be—but it's only one bit of relief. Damian knows what he’s done, has seen monstrosities committed unflinchingly and unfailingly by all three living generations of his kind.

Has been one, even if he hadn't seen his first death seconds after being taken out of the incubator, even if he hadn't gone on to murder as many people as his training dictated; he was born an injury. He didn't realize it for years, but once his conscious mind stopped hiding from it, there was no other conclusion to turn to: Damian exists only because his mother had raped his father. Her methods don’t matter; whether Batman was in his right mind, whether he was drugged or tricked or lied to or simply forced, doesn’t matter; because whatever he consented to, it wasn’t Damian.

(Sometimes he wonders if that wasn’t exactly why Talia freely let him go—if she expected Bruce to project some of that hurt onto its consequence, to reject Damian or to hate him and thus send him running back, all of his doubts melted away in the heat of his father’s rejection. He can’t imagine her misjudging Batman so deeply, but he couldn’t imagine her putting a bounty on her firstborn’s head, either; and look where _that_ got him.)

So he knows—he knows he’s capable of that too, that additional form of depravity on top of the death and the torture, and he can’t…

Even the risk of letting that happen (especially with _Jon_ of all people, who still has to fight not to cry every time he learns some new thing about where Damian came from, and it’s still out of sympathy and not horror every single time) is too much. Even if Jon thinks it’s of his own accord. He’s younger—not by much by adult standards, but by _enough_ given their ages when they met. If he comes to mold himself into an additional form of affection, that’s one thing. If _Damian_ does it, even by accident, he’s no better than his mother. (He’s potentially worse. If Batman was himself on the night the other half of Damian’s DNA was taken, he might have had an inkling that the liaison came with some terrible consequence looming in Talia’s legacy. Jon is so completely, naïvely trusting that betrayal would never occur to him, and the very nature of it would ensure he would insist it was never a betrayal at all.)

* * *

***

* * *

 

“Robin?”

Damian cracks an eye open. He doesn’t remember falling asleep, just resting his head on his forearms six hours into Superboy’s repose, but the computer is giving off the low hum of hibernation and he can feel creases in his face from where his mask and vambraces dug into his cheek. He pushes his upper body off the desk, shakes himself to try and get his blood flowing a little more effectively, and gets up.

“Superboy,” he acknowledges, and goes to mess with the sunlamps again. “How do you feel?”

Jon looks bleary, but still more alert than he did on the plane. He sits up, picks at his shirt, grimaces. “Like I fell asleep in a puddle,” he says. He blinks up at the lights. “You took out my powers?”

“You were just going to fly off again if I didn’t.” Damian throws another towel at him; Jon’s fast enough to catch it, but only just. “You’ve been asleep for…” He checks his gauntlet computer. “Almost twelve hours.”

“…oh,” Jon says. “And you stayed? The whole time?” He looks simultaneously awed and appalled, as if Damian could possibly have anything more important to do than make sure the youngest member of a near-extinct species of superheroes (and also his best friend) didn’t kill himself trying to save everyone on the planet at once.

“Of course I stayed,” he says. “The world can handle my absence for a few hours, Jon.”

Jon looks like he’s caught midway to rolling his eyes when a thought strikes him. “Wait, what happened with—”

Damian shrugs. “Your father took care of it, I assume,” he says, and takes his place back at the desk.

Superboy looks unaccountably nervous, but he stands up. “I’m going to…” he says, and gestures vaguely at the shower.

“I’ll be here,” Robin answers, firing the computer back up again and frowning as the screen snaps into life.

* * *

He’s—as careful as he knows how to be. Not killing someone is, comparatively, easy to track. How can Damian know he’s not manipulating someone unless his actions are as cold, as flatly featureless as they possibly can be? How many times did Talia trick him into staying his hand by feigning pain? How many times did she redirect him away from his wandering wants by showing hurt at his potential rejection? Displays are a bid for control whether he means them to be or not. (Emotions are a weapon, and he leaves his weapons sheathed until they’re absolutely necessary these days.)

He isn’t cruel, because that would hurt Jon, and—and apart from all of the other reasons he has not to want that, Damian worries that doing so would just make Jon irrationally crave his approval even more.

It feels so much like a tightrope that he almost thinks he should ask Grayson for advice. (But then, he can probably figure it out just by thinking of it, this absurd follow-your-heart what’s-a-safety-net caricature of hubris, always leaping and never looking. It isn’t that he wouldn’t understand Damian’s nervousness; Grayson understands him better than anyone but Father or Jon himself—it’s just that the nerves, to him, would constitute even more of a reason to fling himself headlong into danger. Perhaps he’d have a point if it were just _Damian’s_ danger, but he isn’t going to risk Jon’s health and wellbeing on Grayson’s impulsiveness, thank you very much.)

* * *

Jon reemerges less than five minutes later, trying to comb through the absolute disaster of his hair with his fingers, having replaced his seawater-stiffened clothing for a near-identical pair of jeans and another t-shirt. (This one, somewhat whimsically, has Batman’s sigil over the chest. Damian has to fight not to roll his eyes every time he sees it.)

“I take it your powers are coming back,” Robin says. His mask itches. He peels it off, frowns at the tiny layer of skin that comes off with it. Hmm.

“They’re getting there,” Jon says, finally giving up on his hair beyond making sure it’s not in his eyes. (Maybe Damian should have offered to cut it before turning the lights back to yellow. It can’t be easy flying with that unruly mess getting into his face.)

“The hearing?” he presses, leaning back in the chair.

There’s just a flash, almost quick enough to disregard, of an almost haunted look in Jon’s eyes. “Getting there,” he repeats. “Not… much yet, but that might be… you know.” He gestures vaguely at the airlock. “I should get back out there. Thanks for looking after me, but—”

Of course. “No,” Robin says. “You’re staying here until you can control it.”

Jon pauses. “Huh?”

“You were flying around the world for a _week,_ ” he continues, putting his feet up on the desk because nobody’s there to tell him not to.

“People needed help.”

“People always need help. You don’t see Superman dropping out of the sky to take naps in the middle of nowhere, do you?”

“That’s different,” Jon says. “He’s faster than me.”

“Not by that much,” Damian points out. “He’s stronger, but not by that much. His senses are sharper, but not by _much._ I needed to drag you out of the Pacific because _you_ couldn’t calm down enough to realize that you were being an idiot.”

“Hey!”

Robin fixes him with a flat look.

Jon fidgets. “I got tired,” he says lamely.

Damian scoffs. “You don’t say,” he drawls.

“I couldn’t just… _leave_ them,” Superboy insists. His voice cracks. It’s about a 50-50 chance that it’s caused by the last vestiges of a slowish puberty as much as just emotion, but something in Damian’s chest twitches sympathetically anyway. “You don’t know what I was hearing, Dami.” Definitely emotion.

“I can make an educated guess or two.” For Jon’s sake, he tries to make his voice softer, figure out what Batman does when he’s talking to the victims instead of the perpetrators of something horrible. As much as he could mimic his father’s pitch and timbre with enough precision to fool the Computer, he’s never quite been able to control his own voice like that without turning it into someone else’s. “You can’t save everyone. You know that.”

“I have to _try,_ ” Jon’s insisting, and no, no _no_ he’s missing the point so spectacularly it actually makes Damian want to throw something at him as much as comfort him.

“Not if it starts killing you.” Damian schools his expression into neutrality because he doesn’t know what else it ought to be doing. “Your father has an entire life outside of being Superman, you know. In this case I agree with him.”

Jon scrubs at his face with a hand. His hair flops over his fingertips again. “I can’t just ignore it,” he says raggedly. “And I used to be able to just not _hear_ it, but…”

But that changed, shifting into place just like everything else has. “You used to be able to look at something without worrying about drilling a hole through it,” he points out. “You used to be able to open a door in a hurry without thinking about whether you would rip it off its hinges. You got those under control too.”

“This is different,” Jon insists.

Damian sits up. “Superman didn’t seem to think so,” he says. “He said it was just a matter of finding something else to focus on.” Simple, he’d said. Predictable. Familiar. Robin had been trying to come up with something that fit all three categories and was in easy reach; he had really only narrowed it down to the one that… puts him a little more on edge than he’d like to be. A snort. “Right,” Kent says. “Because that’s easy when—” He cuts himself off, jaw tense. His voice is tighter than it was a minute ago; _getting there,_ he’d said. Is it coming back that quickly, or is he just remembering what it was like when it was there in full force?

Making Superman his auditory touchstone is all well and good, until he leaves the planet. Jon’s mother gets into trouble more than anyone Damian has ever heard of except maybe Grayson; not precisely good for keeping his mind _off_ of people who need rescuing.

(Simple. Predictable. Familiar. There really is only one choice, in the end.) “Listen to me,” Damian says quietly.

Jon looks at him. And looks at him. And frowns. “I… am?”

Idiot. Robin rolls his eyes and gets up. “No, you aren’t,” he says, crossing over until he’s close enough to take Jon’s hand. He didn’t think to take his gauntlets off (poor planning; stupid). His armor is thicker over the sternum (he’s only going to get run through once in his life if he can help it). As much as it makes him tense up to have someone else’s hand on his throat, he doesn’t have too many options left that don’t involve words; so he guides Jon’s fingers up to the side of his neck like a mirror of what he’d done earlier. (Except Kent doesn’t squeeze. He just stares blankly into Robin’s eyes like he’s some impossibly complex puzzle.) “ _Listen_ to me,” Damian repeats.

He doesn’t school his breathing or his heartbeat, or Jon will only think to be attuned to him when he’s calm, but he doesn’t let them get away from him either. Jon’s thumb brushes over his trachea (could punch a hole in it quicker than Damian could even see, but that old programmed distrust of everything he can’t pin down and destroy barely makes him blink these days) and he doesn’t swallow, doesn’t move. He drops his hand and Kent hesitates, frozen, before he correctly decides that Robin would be a little ruder about it if he was meant to move as well.

Jon’s eyes aren’t _all_ blue, Damian knows. There’s a starburst of grey around the pupils like the seconds of totality in a solar eclipse; it’s hard to tell at a distance and in most forms of light, but the skin of his face is dappled in a smattering of freckles, and—

_Get out, get out, get out—_

—and Damian will stay absolutely stone-still for as long as Jon needs him to be.

“Okay,” Jon says. “Okay.” A tiny laugh, barely breathed out but still close enough that Robin can’t not hear it. His heart does something unforgivably stupid. The fingers on his neck relax, shifting away from the pulse points but not… leaving, exactly, just turning into wobbly lines and ovals of contact. “I have to say, Dami, this is… a little weird. You’re sure you don’t mind?”

No. Not remotely sure. “Does it help?” he asks instead.

“I’m not sure. I think so?” Jon drops his hand and takes a step back, fidgeting with the hem of his shirt. (Damian tries not to feel colder and fails.)

“Then I don’t mind.”

It isn’t that it’s _easy,_ but Damian at least figures out a holding pattern. He spends another two days in the ocean base with Jon, speaking with him, distracting him, until Superboy figures out how to focus on only the sounds he needs to know about. And if those sounds happen to be Damian’s heartbeat when Jon’s feeling stressed and can’t block out the suffering of an entire planet screaming into his ears, then that’s not even a sacrifice. All Damian has to do is exist, and for once— _for once—_ it actually helps.

(If that knowledge happens to make him feel pleased in a quiet way that he has no specific name for… then that’s irrelevant. His own emotions are not, never have been, the priority.)

* * *

It isn’t that he doesn’t know. It’s that he can’t _let_ himself know. He can’t dwell on it, can’t let it stay in a way that invites further investigation; Jon is a fixture in his life and that’s acceptable, but it will become distinctly _less_ acceptable if he lets himself treat Superboy any differently than anyone else he’s so fiercely stuck with.

Except it is different. It’s very different. Or… not so much different as _additional._ As much as he understands that it’s the worst idea in the world to try and dissect the attachment, he can’t simply let it go unquestioned; his father’s influence, perhaps, or perhaps just an instinctive need to rebel against all of the unthinking cultish obedience that the League of Assassins demanded of its own. He esteems the Teen Titans for their skills, as frustrating as most of them can be, and trusts them to have his back when necessary. He trusts his father and his father’s family with everything in him. He isn’t sure where he’d be without Maya. (Particularly, he appreciates Maya’s frank, direct brand of affection, slicing him neatly down to the core when she thinks he’s being ridiculous. Even if that is precisely the reason he can’t come to her about any of this.)

And then there is Jon. Jon has all of this and more still besides. It’s an ‘and’, not an ‘instead of’.

And if he lets himself think about it, it terrifies him. So he tries not to.

* * *

Damian is seventeen when it gets suddenly worse.

He’s done a good job of concealing the… the subspecies of affection that he apparently has for his friend; he must have, because Jon doesn’t treat him like a romantic interest—and, unfortunately, Damian knows what that looks like. (Jon is surprisingly distractible for a creature in such complete control of himself; more than once, Damian has seen his eyes skitter down the street to track someone particularly attractive before snapping back to the task at hand with an almost embarrassed focus. He likes staying behind to chat to anyone they rescue, but he holds himself differently sometimes, hesitates between words or stammers slightly before cutting himself off. He changes even more when it’s someone he knows, someone he’s attached to, has discussed it with; Damian has observed that gentle attention from a distance, pinned it down and cataloged it and come to the conclusion that it’s never been turned on him. Which is good. Which is excellent.)

Jon doesn’t treat him like someone he _doesn’t_ want as a romantic interest, either, and that’s better still. Superboy is… direct, honest, and above all communicative; if he suspected a thing in either direction, he’d at least ask about it. Perhaps he’d take Damian at his word if it was in the negative, or perhaps he’d press, but at the very least he’d… Jon would be gentle about it. As careful as he always has been. If he were remotely worried about breaking Damian’s heart or something similarly ridiculous, he wouldn’t be so open about his pursuits of and feelings towards other people. Not that he rubs it in as it is _now,_ of course, but—

Jon is inherently lovable. His first interest that actually goes anywhere (that Damian knows of, which means that she probably really is the first) happens at thirteen and ends about a month later. (Not painfully, Jon is quick to assure Damian. It just ends, and that’s okay.) There’s a boyfriend at fourteen for a couple of weeks before the human panics about how to bring the relationship up to anyone outside it. (That one _is_ painful, but Jon still won’t let Robin so much as scold the boy for not thinking the situation through before jumping headlong into it and hurting the only person Damian has ever—) Damian doesn’t bother tracking it much past that, because none of it will mean anything, and he has better things to do than memorize the hormonal shenanigans of teenagers.

Until one of them doesn’t go away for six solid months, and Jon won’t shut the hell up about her (her name is Jenny, she has brown eyes and black hair and she’s never gotten a question wrong in any math class she’s ever been in and—)

And Jon, Jon, Jon _tells_ her about Superboy. And she tells him about what she can do, space and time warping beneath her fingertips while she fights back a chuckle that’s almost bashful, and Jon lights up from the inside when he tells Robin (with her permission, because of course he asked) and Damian feels the floor tip sideways underneath him.

(Part of him, underneath it all, had always thought that no one else would ever know both sides of Jon like he did. Or, if they did, that they’d never _understand._ The odds of Jon finding another superpowered individual in his civilian social circle, of developing any sort of feelings for them besides—they had been so astronomically high that Damian hadn’t even considered it as a possibility, and that oversight slams the breath out of him like a punch to the gut.)

“Damian?” Jon’s expression falters. Damian rigidly schools his own, far too late. “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” Robin answers tetchily, finding himself fascinated by the progress bar crawling across his monitor. “I hope this doesn’t mean you intend to bring her into our—” He struggles for a word for just a moment too long, hopes that Jon can chalk it up to Damian just forgetting which language he needs to be speaking—“partnership,” he settles on, even though the word feels like it carries more abruptly intimate connotations than it ought.

“Uh,” Jon says. Damian can hear the frown in his voice. “I mean, she’s curious about you, but if you don’t want to meet her…”

“That is not what I said.” If he can redirect, can brush this off as fear of losing a current dynamic and not fear of losing the thing he’d never allow himself to ask for anyway, then perhaps—

“Okay, but… You’ve never been this weird before. About this, I mean.” A slight hitch of breath. Robin shuts his eyes. “Are you _jealous?”_

 _“No.”_ Jealousy is ridiculous. “I don’t even know the girl, nor do I care to. There’s nothing to be jealous of.”

“Not jealous of _me,_ you—”

This needs to be stopped. He needs to stop this. Robin jerks out of his chair, takes the hurt out of his body language and molds it into anger. “Did it ever occur to you that it wouldn’t have just been _your_ identity at stake if she hadn’t understood why it wasn’t public knowledge?” he snaps. “You and I work together more than with anyone else, and you’ve hardly kept our friendship a secret as civilians—”

“Oh, because you’re so much less obvious about it?”

“I could have been if I thought you would understand the necessity enough not to be hurt by it. I _would_ have been if I’d known you’d do this.” He’s seething, his heart too high and too fast, deafening in his ears. Disproportionate, but he doesn’t know how to force it back down without losing the rest of the facade. “Endangering yourself is your main hobby and I know that’s not likely to stop, but endangering _me—_ and her too, if she hadn’t been just as capable of defending herself as you are—”

Something shifts in Jon’s eyes, a flicker of surprise and then something like horror, which is acceptable—but then it turns into something horribly like pity, and Damian feels the situation slip a little further away from his control. “Oh,” Jon says. “Damian—”

“Don’t,” Robin grates out.

Jon covers his face. “Oh my god,” he says tightly. “You’re the smartest person I know—”

Damian snorts. “Obviously,” he says, and steadfastly ignores the little pleased flash of a reaction in his blood, even underneath… underneath everything else.

“—but I swear you’re somehow also the _dumbest._ ”

He waits for his jaw to unclench. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Jon takes a slow breath, dropping his hands to his sides. “Okay, second dumbest,” he says, lower, a little self-conscious. “I know you don’t care about Jenny. And I know your identity isn’t why you’re mad about this, because if it were then that would have been the _first_ thing you said. Even if I really should have thought to ask you first and I’m sorry. But—”

 _“Don’t,”_ Damian says again, but it sounds more like a plea than a demand this time. He tastes blood. Fear grips him, sinks its claws into his gut as acutely as if Scarecrow had gassed him. He’s losing, he’s already lost, he should have known he couldn’t stay this close without Jon finding out; he should have known that he’d have to cut off the best friend he’s ever had over this, that—

Jon’s face pulls a little closer to a frown, but he presses forward—and _steps_ forward, and Damian can’t help the way his blood jerks in panic, but at least it makes Jon stop right where he is. “You’re jealous of her, aren’t you,” he says, and the words are a question but the way he says it isn’t. Because he knows. (And if he knows now, if he’s figured it out _now,_ it’s hard to accept the fact that he hadn’t known all along.)

The knowledge tastes like freedom (he doesn’t have to hide it if it’s already open) and a judgment (because he can’t _stay_ if Jon knows) all at once. “There’s nothing to be jealous of,” he repeats, voice clipped.

Jon looks wholly, inexplicably sad. “Dami,” he says softly. “You can’t lie around me. You know that, right?”

Robin makes himself stay still, to face his doom and fling himself through it. “Why not?” he asks. “It worked before.”

“I never asked before.” Jon sighs, the tension bleeding out of him. He rocks onto his back foot, runs his fingers through his hair. “If you’d told me, I would have—”

“I don’t care what you would have done.”

“We could have at least _tried_ it, jeez,” Superboy says, needled. “I mean, not right now, but… you know.”

He doesn’t need to hear this. He can’t hear this. “I wouldn’t have let you,” he says instead.

Jon’s eyebrows shoot up. “Uh?” he says. “You’ve lost me.”

Damian knows he has. “You—” deserve better; would only end up hurt somehow; shouldn’t try to integrate himself into Damian’s hang-ups and issues than has already happened— “It wouldn’t be a good idea.”

“Well, no,” Jon says patiently. “I have a girlfriend.”

Robin narrows his eyes at him. “It wouldn’t be a good idea _ever,_ Jon.”

“You can’t just throw that out there and not tell me why.”

“I have my reasons.”

Jon waits for just long enough that it becomes clear that Damian won’t continue. “Which are…?” he prods. “Come on, Dami. I’ve been listening to you breathing every night for years just so I can go to sleep. How many boundaries do we even _have_ anymore?”

“One,” Damian says, and turns to leave before Jon can talk him over that last line too.

But of course Jon can’t just let it be. “You were my first crush, you know,” he says. “First one who wasn’t a TV show character, I mean.”

Robin stops in his tracks. He swallows once, and then again, until the tightness in his throat shudders away. He can feel the material of his gauntlets scrape against itself. “That’s one of the reasons,” he says, and rewards himself for the monotone by closing the door behind him and ~~fleeing~~ ~~escaping~~ leaving for real.

* * *

It should have made it easier.

It didn’t.

Damian still speaks to Jon as much as he ever did when they’re playing civilians; he still works alongside him when both of them are needed somewhere. But when that doesn’t happen, they don’t speak—Damian because he can’t, and Jon because… well, presumably because he’s respecting Damian’s need for space. And Damian appreciates that on one level, but hates it with every part of him at the same time, because—

Because Jon keeps caring for him even when that just makes the situation worse. Because Jon isn’t calling him out, knocking his walls down and demanding an explanation. Because Jon is letting him pull away without a fight, because he thinks that’s what Damian needs, and… and he’s right, but that’s not what he _wants._

(What he wants is selfish and awful. What he wants is for Jon to come to him, to force himself the rest of the way into Damian’s heart, to _finish this._ He wants to be made to forget all of the reasons why what he’s doing now is the correct response, the proper course of action.)

Jenny is decent, Damian discovers along the way. (Her father is terrifying, according to Jon—well, one of them, anyway. And then Damian finds out who said fathers are, and he suddenly understands why Jon would think that.) She’s decent, and capable, and not the last surviving heir to an international cult of murderers. He can… he can approve. He should approve. He will, he’s sure, eventually.

* * *

_Eventually_ doesn’t come in time.

It’s another year before it happens, but it happens nonetheless. Jon is reserved in a way that he usually isn’t, one night; maybe Damian should have been a little gentler about asking him why, but a distracted Superboy on patrol is not something that he particularly enjoys worrying about.

“Oh,” Jon says. “Uh. Sorry, I’m just… little off today.”

“I noticed,” Robin remarks, twirling a batarang around his fingers. “Anything I need to be concerned about?”

“I’m not sick or dying or anything,” Jon answers, looking resolutely away. “Just a breakup. I’ll be okay. Can we keep going?”

Damian nearly drops the batarang, catches it, and puts it carefully back in its slot. His heartbeat is steady, his breathing metronomic, by the time he speaks again. “I see,” he says.

Jon shoots him a look so flatly unimpressed that it momentarily throws off all of Damian’s meditative control over his circulatory system. “Don’t you dare go off on a weird self-guilt trip, Damian,” he says in a tone of voice which would be dangerous from anyone else on the planet. “I can’t… it was just a _thing_ that happened, okay? Has nothing to do with you.”

As if Damian can do anything but overanalyze every single second of everything he’s done since Jenny came into the picture in the first place—as if his pessimism wasn’t the only thing standing in the way of hoping Jon had forgotten that conversation altogether—but the message comes across loud and clear. “Okay,” he says. “For what it’s worth, I am sorry. ...That it happened.” He struggles for something else to say, something adequately sympathetic without sounding self-flagellating, but nothing springs to mind.

Jon nods once. “Thanks,” he says. “Can we keep going? I’ll try to pay better attention, I promise.”

And—and all Damian wants to do is _help,_ but he’s never in his life known how to help with this. His only experience with this kind of comfort was in an entirely different context, with entirely different people. With Jon, as always, the line gets smudged; he isn’t sure now what would be proper and what would just look like—

Like someone trying to take advantage of it, swoop in when he’s vulnerable and try to redirect any lingering emotion back to himself.

Robin makes an acknowledging sound. “Make sure you do,” he says. “I don’t want to have to explain this to your father if you get yourself hurt.”

It’s all that he’ll allow himself to say.

* * *

He almost asks Grayson for advice five times, but finds himself closing the message every time because he already knows what his predecessor will say. Or, rather, the individual components of it. Damian is still of the personal opinion that Grayson is the _last_ person who should have done any sort of spywork or espionage, but he can’t deny that Nightwing’s ability to read people—or perhaps just to read Waynes—is worryingly good. It doesn’t matter how Damian phrases his questions; Richard will cut through them all, right down to the quick of him, grasp the heart of the matter and pull it out into the light. And he won’t even have the decency to be anything but careful and kind about it, to let Damian focus on it as a betrayal instead of the relief of a bullet being dug out of a wound.

There’s nothing to be done about it, not on that front, so he doesn’t try.

* * *

You  
[01.58] I’m attracted to Kent.

Richard Grayson  
[02.01] I’m assuming you mean Jon here  
[02.01] not that Clark is bad-looking, just doesn’t seem like your type

You  
[02.01] Jon.

Richard Grayson  
[02.01] you’re just figuring this out now?

You  
[02.02] No.

Richard Grayson  
[02.02] hey, you’re doing better than Bruce did. good job

You  
[02.02] That’s all you have to say?

Richard Grayson  
[02.02] not my love life, kiddo  
[02.03] you should go for it  
[02.03] he’s good for you

You  
[02.03] Too good.

Richard Grayson  
[02.07] remember how I said you were doing better than Bruce?  
[02.07] I take it back  
[02.09] look, just think about it, okay?  
[02.09] being happy isn’t the worst thing in the world

You  
[02.11] Noted.

* * *

In an incredibly roundabout way, the conversation helps. It helps just to have it in the first place, in a strange way—not quite like a weight removed, but that it was perhaps lightened for a few minutes, just to have it acknowledged by someone who wasn’t involved in it. Damian means to leave it there at first; he honestly does.

But it nags at him—how flatly unsurprised Richard had been, how… casual; and Damian had known that it took a lot to shake Nightwing out of his general air of ease, but enormous mistakes by family members have always managed it before. He knew that others most likely wouldn’t view it as a mistake, per se, but surely they would understand his reasoning if he explained it.

He hadn’t explained it, admittedly, but Grayson’s instincts were good even if he wanted to veer closer to optimism than was probably safe; if he’d noticed something off, he would have said something. Would have tried to spare Damian’s emotions, but would have said _something._

(Which makes it sound… horribly… like it isn’t a bad idea. And that just keeps him thinking about it, and that makes it so much worse; and a month goes by and Jon still doesn’t mention anyone else and it’s probably just because he needs some time to figure out where he stands with Jenny as friends before he carries on with something else, but Damian can’t help but dissect that inaction just as much as anything else. He realizes at some point that he _wants_ it to be deliberate on Jon’s part, realizes at another that he sneaks more glances at Jon when they’re together than he can adequately brush off as checking to see if he looks sad, realizes at yet another that it’s gone too far for him to stop through anything but the steady application of time. He wakes up one morning with sunlight on his lips in the shape of a dream and he doesn’t know how he can possibly come back from this.)

Grayson had mentioned Father and Selina. Perhaps that might be the answer in and of itself, or at least something he can extrapolate into one.

* * *

He should ask Father first, he knows, but—for now, this is easier. Bringing any of this up to Batman will calcify it into something he can’t forget or brush off as a momentary lapse in emotion or judgement. Batman knows Damian better than that. And he also—

Damian isn’t sure what his father would think of this.

So here he is, walking almost silently across the carpeting to arrive just in Catwoman’s line of sight. She’s curled up on a sofa, one leg stretched across almost its entire length, the other half-folded to provide a resting spot for what looks worryingly like a romance novel. She doesn’t acknowledge him; he wouldn’t even think that she knew he was there if it wasn’t for the way her neck is angled just barely closer to Damian than it is to the paper, and that can’t be comfortable to stay for very long. So.

“Selina,” Damian says. He keeps his voice normal, at least for that long.

She raises her eyebrows, but still doesn’t look up. “Damian,” she says, with a quiet solemnity that falls just short of being mocking.

“Why did you—” No, that sounds accusing. “How did you know you wanted to marry Father?”

That gets her attention. Selina meets his eyes, curious, slipping her forefinger between the pages to keep her place. “A little late for this particular discussion, aren’t you?” she asks.

He doesn’t dignify that with a response. She doesn’t seem to expect him to; she certainly doesn’t wait for one.

“Quite a few reasons,” she continues, stretching the kinks out of her neck with a lazy roll. “Most of them, I’m sure you don’t want to hear.”

Damian bites back a sigh. “Correct.”

She goes quiet for a moment, eyes trained on the ceiling. “When you live a life like ours, you gain an… appreciation for constants,” she says at last. “It took a while, but he began to feel like I was coming home. He still feels like coming home.” Abruptly, as if the frankness has imbued her with some kind of energy, Selina swings her legs over the side of the sofa and sits up almost straight. “What brought this on, Damian? Somehow I feel like this isn’t just a _you aren’t my_ **_real_ ** _mom_ conversation that got delayed by a few years.”

There’s a flicker, a pang—he knows that he wouldn’t be who he is without Talia, knows that he’s more useful as he is and has done more good as he is, but the child in him still wishes that Talia were anything but his mother—but he ignores it. “Curiosity,” he says.

Selina quirks an eyebrow at him. “I’m not sure what they say about curiosity and birds,” she says. “But I do know that you would have asked before if something hadn’t happened to _make_ you curious.” Her eyes glitter. “You aren’t getting married yourself, are you?”

Damn her. “No,” he says tightly. “Not likely ever.”

A snort. “That’s what I thought, too,” Selina says dryly, sitting back again. “And now look at me.” She shakes her head a little, a smile pulling at her lips. “Well, whoever’s got you thinking about it, I hope you’ll let us know _before_ it gets that serious. Batman might not be able to give a proper shotgun talk, but I’m sure I can throw something together.”

“It’s Jon,” Damian says without thinking. “I don’t think that’s necess—”

He only realizes he’s misspoken when her smile widens. He feels, dizzily, that their respective mantles are not quite as reassuring as they could be just this second. “It’s _always_ necessary, Damian,” she says smoothly. “I’ll just have to make sure it’s a magic shotgun.”

The world is tilting and hurtling through space and for a few seconds he can feel it. “We work together,” he says. “We’re friends. That’s all.”

“You wouldn’t be here if that were all. Does he know?”

Damian could leave. He could walk away at any point. The grandfather clock feels too loud. “He knows,” he says quietly. “But I won’t go further than that. Thank you, Selina.” He turns on his heel and makes to leave. “You’ve been very informative.”

He hears the rustle of fabric on upholstery as she stands. “Damian, wait.”

Damian freezes in place, but he doesn’t turn. (He could keep walking. She holds no power over him, no authority beyond what he gives her. No one does.)

Selina’s footfalls barely make a whisper as she passes by him, stands in front of him again. She looks concerned, and something inside Damian relaxes— _finally,_ he thinks.

But it doesn’t happen how he feels that it should. “Is everything okay?” is all she asks.

“Fine,” Damian says automatically.

She pinches the bridge of her nose. “Of course,” she says, a Pennyworth-esque exhaustion rising to the forefront of her tone. “Wrong question.” She’s silent for a few seconds more, considering. “Have you talked to your father?” she asks instead.

“No.”

“Why not?”

He does not fidget. “There’s nothing to talk to him about,” he says, as if he wasn’t planning on asking him this very thing just the same.

“If there was nothing, you wouldn’t be talking to _me,_ either.” Selina’s eyes soften. She leans a shoulder against the wall. “Not that I hate you coming to me with this first,” she continues, “but you’re closer to him, and you know his response wouldn’t be much different from mine.”

Damian looks away.

“ _Damian._ He wouldn’t care about this.” Selina reaches out before pausing, her hand halfway to his shoulder, and dropping. “If you’re worried about his feelings towards you liking another man, it would make him more of a hypocrite than he’s ever been.”

It’s a stab in the dark, and it’s not what he was worried about, but it pulls just a little too close to something that he _was._ “I know that,” he says crossly. “It isn’t—” He bites his tongue. “Mother grew me to be a legacy for the house of al Ghul. I’m not worried about what Father—”

“Oh, no one cares what _she_ wanted you to be,” Selina says, slicing her fingers through the air as if batting the suggestion away before it’s fully formed. “Least of all you, and _second_ least of all Bruce. And as for the ‘legacy’ bullshit, don’t you dare feel obligated to be for Wayne what she wanted you to be for herself. You can make whatever you want to, for one, and for another…” A snicker. “If Bruce gave a damn about bloodlines, he wouldn’t have adopted so many children before someone else made a biological one _for_ him.”

Damian blinks at her, stunned momentarily into silence. “I wasn’t concerned about his reaction on that front,” he says—and it’s at least more than half the truth, even if the trickle of relief down his spine means that at least some part of him _did_ wonder if the Wayne family dying with Damian would bother its previous survivor. “But I am worried about what Mother would do to him if she suspected anything.” And that isn’t a lie either, even if that concern pales in the face of what Damian himself could do to him, just by being honest.

Selina’s smile is not kind. “I’d worry more about what might happen to her if she tries. Or I _would_ worry, anyway, if she were someone else.”

* * *

Even with Catwoman’s encouragement—such as it is—it takes Damian more time than he’s comfortable dwelling on to ask his father the same question. He has his reasons—he’s busy, Batman is busy, most of their time in the same room is spent comparing notes on cases and continually honing each other’s skills—and they ring true enough in the moment, but fall pathetically flat when he’s through with them.

He’s afraid, still. And that has never sat well with him.

When he finally runs out of excuses—or runs out of patience for them—he seeks Batman out.

He doesn’t deliberate over his question this time, because he knows that there’s no more point to it than there was when it was Grayson. “Why did you propose to Selina?”

And she must have talked to him at some point, explained the conversation, or at least given him some sort of warning that Damian would ask at some point; because Batman doesn’t react. He slides out from his place underneath the Batmobile, brushes his cowl-mussed hair away from his face, and regards him with a steady look. Whatever he sees, he doesn’t react to—at least, not that Robin can tell.

“Because asking was less frightening than living without her.”

* * *

Phrasing it as a matter of fear shouldn’t be what changes his mind. He’s absolutely sure of it. Love is—

(He doesn't know what love is. A mother who cared for him only when he tore himself apart for her, who only won his father over through deceit, a ruined thing before he even drew his first breath—Selina provides a better example now, but it's too late to overwrite the first ten years of his life. The parameters, the definitions, will always be skewed.)

Popular opinion is varied and unreliable, but fear never came into play—not like that. Nerves, anxiety, yes; not the marrow-melting terror that it would have to be to affect Batman, to take a man who defined and embraced and _became_ fear and bring him to his knees.

So—as much as Damian doesn’t trust himself, doesn’t trust the implication that anything he feels could possibly be good or decent or _wanted,_ he knows his father wouldn’t lead him astray with something so vital—perhaps, perhaps they aren’t different here. Perhaps, in this specific way, for this specific thing… perhaps he isn’t irreparable. Perhaps this can be faced and fought and overcome; or perhaps he can be allowed to… to…

(His mother created a trap, baited it with a weaponized child, and called it a family. His brothers, historically, are disastrous. Kane somehow has worse taste than his _father_ half the time—if nothing else, Father had the excuse of his own optimism clouding his judgement, but Kane had to know whose bed she was sharing at least a little. Gordon is constantly on the move these days; Brown, he barely sees. Cain may have made a decent blueprint, but she isn’t precisely an open book even when her emotions run close to the surface. Jon… Jon is his own unique set of problems all to himself. Damian doesn’t _know—_ )

Of course, just because it’s a little closer to being understandable doesn’t mean that it’s something he knows what to do with. There are new rules to this, an entirely different dynamic and a separate kind of etiquette, and everyone else figured it all out while Damian was busy learning how not to kill. And the one person he could ask without fear of being teased… just so happens to also be the only person it’s _impossible_ for him to ask.

Instead, he puts increasingly embarrassing search terms into an incognito window in a public library several miles away from any area he frequents, and he finds it to be the least enlightening experience he’s ever gone through.

* * *

_Have you,_ Damian taps out, and then immediately backspaces.

_Could_

_Would you be_

_Do you_

No.

Damian huffs, kicking the heel of his foot rhythmically against the gargoyle supporting him. This is ridiculous. He’s fought robots and aliens and assassins and demons and monstrosities from parallel worlds. He’s fought a projection of his older, worst self. He _died._

He leans back, glaring up at the sky. Jon would be able to see the stars through the cloud cover and the light pollution. Jon would also be able to talk to his best friend without all of this… nonsense.

“Coward,” Damian accuses himself under his breath. He sighs heavily, digs his fingers into his eyes until green-purple starbursts cloud his vision. They don’t bring him any particular revelations.

It isn’t even anything that Jon doesn’t know about. There’s no excuse for this lunatic anxiety.

 _I need to speak with you,_ Damian types out and sends before he has the chance to second-guess it.

The message is read. Jon starts typing. The back of Damian’s neck prickles, but he assumes it’s just this whole… situation… getting to him.

(And then there’s a sharp little snap of pain, below his hairline and above the collar of his cape, just where his armor ends—)

 _Mother,_ he thinks, like a curse. The phone (he shouldn’t have even brought it, too easy to track even with everything he’s done to it; he could have just as easily stayed home and) slips through his fingers; he isn’t awake to see it fall.


	2. but I can see the lighthouse

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Robin awakens unharmed, as far as he can tell.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ProtoDan promised to give me a soda if I snuck some Jean-Paul/Luke in here so here's some sicknasty background relationship bullshit
> 
> also Selina again

Robin awakens unharmed, as far as he can tell. He doesn’t open his eyes, doesn’t move, doesn’t so much as alter the depth or frequency of his breathing; but he takes stock of his limbs, their placement and positioning, whether they’re falling at the proper angles. No breaks, though his shoulder feels hot and prickling and all wrong somehow; he hadn’t been allowed to topple off of the building altogether, if he started to slip off at all.

It isn’t reassuring. Most people who would want to get the drop on him would be trying to kill him outright, not knock him out and kidnap him. (As if  _ that _ has a history of working.)

There is something soft under his cheek. The fabric smells clean, but the scent is familiar in a way that makes his stomach pulse with simultaneous melancholy and fear and nausea. There’s the ghost of a memory-smell of blood underneath the soap (sometimes his, sometimes theirs, but always washed away by the time he made his way back and bled on it all over again)—and a pang, the worn-down path of mourning a thing that never was from a person who never existed the way he needed.

His head feels thick and heavy, cotton balls stuffed behind his eyes and inside his mouth, a weird tinny taste on the back of his tongue. His nerves don’t feel like they quite work yet. His skin is weighted all wrong; he’s still clothed, but not in  _ his  _ clothes, not in his armor. He should have seen this coming, should have  _ known _ this would happen, but he’d been so caught up in his own idiotic—

If he suspected he were anywhere else, that this was a standard kidnapping, he would have tried to sleep off the rest of the tranquilizer, trusted that he’d wake up if anything else untoward happened. But his mother is… subtler than most when she needs to be.

(An army of botched copies of him, lurching about with too many limbs, malformed infant heads on hulking bodies only approximately humanoid. Perhaps  _ subtle _ would be the wrong word.)

It’s true that there are any number of things that she could have already done, but—but the Heretic was killed, and it had to have been on her order. The closest thing to a perfect son she’d ever managed and she had still discarded him in the end. She wants  _ Damian  _ back, not his approximation, not a clone or a mimicry; and so he suspects that she won’t try much of anything until he adequately proves there isn’t another choice.

Again.

(It’s also true that all of this is probably irrelevant, that she has everything she could possibly need to recreate him locked up in stasis somewhere, cataloged and filed and preserved like an archival serial killer. But the illusion that anything he does here matters is a tempting one, and just barely plausible enough for him to believe.)

Robin doesn’t hear anyone else in the room; and while that doesn’t necessarily mean anything in an assassin base (he assumes), there’s nothing to be done about that but to trust his senses for now. He opens his eyes.

The room he’s in is clinically white and not a place that he recognizes. He’d half expected to look around and see a childhood bedroom, some misguided attempt at making him feel nostalgic, but perhaps even Talia knows some lost causes when she sees them. There is a bed—soft sheets, dark colors, the stupid  _ smell  _ of it, but the detergent is the closest thing to something meant to tug at his emotions that he can immediately find. There’s a desk, a chair, something that could be either a wardrobe or a place to store weapons. A single closed door that he knows without needing to test it will be locked. A second door, cracked open, through which he can see the vague shape of a bathtub.

Nothing remotely helpful, because of course there isn’t.

He pushes himself upright and looks down. He was right about the clothing, but it’s also not particularly familiar; plain, white fabric, nothing particularly interesting either about the material or the cut. If it’s meant to evoke anything in him besides frustration at having his armor stripped from him (being undressed and re-dressed like a child), it’s boredom.

But that, at least, he cannot begrudge her overmuch. Leaving him in his uniform would have meant leaving him with at least six different ways to escape, even if she tried confiscating all of the visible gadgets first. There are any number of things he might be able to dismantle in the room to try and piece something together, but most likely not without being drugged into unconsciousness first, again.

Robin gets up and makes it halfway to the possibly-a-wardrobe to see if there’s anything useful inside when the door opens. He doesn’t look.

“Damian,” she says.

He presses his tongue to the inside of his teeth. He doesn’t acknowledge her. Perhaps it’s childish of him—but if she insists on treating him like one, then, well…

“I hope you realize that I never wanted to do this.”

He finds that difficult to believe. Robin takes the remaining two steps to his original destination with deliberate slowness; he opens it. Inside, there are three copies of the outfit he’s already wearing and nothing else. It’s not as though he was expecting anything  _ better, _ but he still scowls at being proven right.

_ “Damian.” _

“You can either kill me now or wait for me to escape,” he says. “Haven’t we been through this enough times, Mother?”

He sees a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye. “I’m not asking you to come home this time.”

“No,” he agrees. “You’re kidnapping me and hoping I come to the conclusion on my own.”

Talia is silent for several long seconds. Damian doesn’t bother asking why. “Nothing would make me happier,” she says finally. “But you still misjudge why I brought you here.”

His jaw aches. He unclenches it with difficulty. “Do I,” he says flatly. “I suppose you’re here to enlighten me whether I want you to or not?”

“I didn’t raise you to spend your life in an alien’s shadow,” she says, and to her credit it’s at least a  _ diplomatic _ way of phrasing her disapproval. “And I fear that’s where you’re headed.”

Jon doesn’t even have a shadow. He is  _ light, _ all the way through, in every part of him; he is everything that Damian never was and could never be—not in a way that makes him something to resent, but in a way that makes him something to nestle close to in the hopes that he can make Damian even just the slightest bit better.

Robin doesn’t say that. “Better his shadow than yours,” he says instead.

“I understand why you don’t trust me,” she says, and it’s almost  _ comedic. _ “But I just want to speak with you, Damian. If I wanted you harmed, you would have been.”

“You have an interesting way of asking to talk.”

“Would you have listened any other way?”

Robin wants, desperately, to say yes just out of spite. But there wouldn’t be a point to it. “You haven’t given me any reason to,” he points out. “I tend to avoid fraternizing with people who killed me.”

He sees her stiffen and fights a twist of cruel delight in it. “I didn’t want you dead,” she says.

“Perhaps your instructions should have been clearer, then.” Robin turns on his heel to return to the bed, making a brief show of inspecting the sheets for booby-traps or bugs.

“I was wrong,” she says, “and I’m sorry. But what I allowed to happen doesn’t mean that I don’t have a right to be concerned when—”

“Jon isn’t going away,” Damian interrupts, turning for the first time to face her. 

“He isn’t family,” Talia returns. “Of course he will.”

He narrows his eyes. “Perhaps,” Robin says. His voice is cold; he  _ feels  _ cold, a familiar seething fury rising slowly in him that—for the first time in years—he doesn’t feel the need to tamp down. “But if you have anything to do with it—if you so much as  _ try  _ to hurt him, Mother, I will do whatever it takes to kill you for good.”

* * *

“Oh boy,” Jon mutters, half a continent away, in a tone of voice that doesn’t even remotely imply excitement.

It’s… on the one hand, it’s weirdly sweet in that backwards, stupid, singular way that is somehow uniquely  _ Damian. _ On the other, he’s come way too far to get dragged back into the murdering habit by the same person who instilled it in him in the first place. If it had been anyone else, Jon could have just chalked the vow up to an exaggeration, or something that didn’t feel like an exaggeration at the time but that Damian couldn’t bring himself to follow through with in the end; but Jon knows him, and he knows that particular tone of voice. It’s the terrifyingly honest one that usually ends with the other party backing down or waking up a week later with half their skeleton held together with screws and metal plates. And, while Jon hasn’t had the misfortune of dealing with Talia very often… she doesn’t really sound like the backing-down kind of person.

He really hopes she isn’t planning on trying to kill him. He has too much other stuff to deal with, like a terminally self-sacrificing best friend who… apparently… still isn’t over him? Or at least Talia doesn’t think he is. And she hasn’t exactly had the best idea of who Damian is as a person or how he feels or where he’s going, but it’s—

It’s really not the time to be dwelling on this of all of the possible things he could be dwelling on,  _ geez. _

Jon’s instincts all shout at him to get over there, follow Damian’s heartbeat to the place he’s being kept, crash through the ceiling and get him out immediately—and he  _ would, _ if it were anyone but Talia in there, but… with her resources and single-minded dedication to whatever she’s trying to do at the time, it might actually be dangerous. Damian may think that he wasted all of those years he spent trying to instill a sense of planning and strategy and Jon not just throwing himself headlong into a problem and trusting his invulnerability to get him out of it again, and he’s right most of the time, but Jon does at least try to be better than that. When he has to.

He turns in the air and shoots back towards Gotham, but he keeps his hearing trained on Damian.

* * *

The conversation doesn’t last long after that, and the rest of the day passes quite uneventfully. The only other person Damian sees is the one apparently designated to bring him food; he does try to talk, but she doesn’t seem to be particularly talkative. Which suits him just as well, really.

He doesn’t eat. He does drink, but only from the tap in the bathroom sink; it could be drugged or poisoned as well, of course, but it’d at least be a little harder to manage. Honestly, he’s not even completely sure why Talia bothered sending him anything at all.

As his mind clears a little more from the residual fog of his initial round of sedatives—and as he’s left there for hours with nothing but his thoughts to occupy him—he starts reconsidering his original plan of staying awake until his release, at least. If Talia needed him unconscious for anything, there was nothing to stop her from just gassing the room; certainly not whatever she had that passed for a conscience. If she wanted him dead, she didn’t need to do it in person; and if for some reason she  _ tried— _ well, Damian had enough trouble sleeping through the night even when nobody was actually trying to sneak up on him. The extra time to observe his surroundings wasn’t worth the slowed reflexes and lower coordination that came with severe sleep deprivation.

He knew that somebody was going to come for him (probably already was, knowing his family); he knew they would find him eventually. It was within everyone’s best interests if he was actually able to fight his way out when they found him. When his eyelids start pulling lower against his will, he lies down and falls asleep with only a token resistance.

Either she really is sedating him again, or nobody comes in to bother him in the middle of the night. Robin awakens a few times, twitching awake with his hand halfway to weapons that aren’t there, but he always opens his eyes to a dark and empty room, apparently roused by nothing.

* * *

The lights have started to gradually come back on in a washed-out mimicry of a sunrise, and he’s not alone.

Despite all his vigilance, all of his nightly interruptions, Talia is there again when he wakes up for real. She’s pulled up a chair by his bedside and has the audacity to sit there in it, reading silently, like she has even the smallest claim to be in his space like she’s actually a part of his family—

“You’re still here?” he asks flatly, sitting up and ignoring the twist of tension between his lungs at the intrusion.

“Of course I am,” Talia answers, not looking up. “You really should have eaten, you know. This is a somewhat juvenile way of showing your disapproval.”

Robin’s stomach claws at itself, as if it’s just been reminded of its own existence. “So you could poison me?” he asks mildly. “Put something in there to erase my memory, try to start again?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Talia says, glancing at him, her eyebrows furrowing slightly. “It’s not your memories I object to, merely your choices.”

If he’d had a choice in the matter at all, he would never have chosen to… to feel anything like this for anyone at all, least of all Jon. “I wouldn’t call it a choice,” Robin says, back rigidly straight, hands folded in his lap.

“Allowing it to stay is.” Talia shifts in her chair. “I allowed my love for your father to stay far past the point that they had started to become harmful to me. I made a decision to end it.”

Robin bites his tongue, his fingernails stinging suddenly in his palms. He flattens his hands down on the bed, makes a conscious effort to untense. “Your own delusions have nothing to do with me,” he says coldly. “You got what you wanted out of him. Don’t pretend it was anything more than that.”

Talia’s expression darkens. “You don’t know what—”

“—I know more than  _ you  _ do, clearly—”

“There was more at stake with your father, and there’s more at stake with  _ you  _ now for you to waste your potential pining over someone who isn’t even  _ human. _ ”

“If it wasn’t Jon, then it would be some other man,” Damian says—and he wasn’t planning to, he knows she won’t care either way, and it’s not as though she’ll consider the knowledge any more of an obstacle to her insane ideals than his free will was, but it slips out of him anyway. “If all of this is about grandchildren, you won’t get them from me.” Not that she would either way; he knows better than to allow any other children to be her blood descendant, not while she’s still breathing.

So all of this is for the best, really.

Talia doesn’t even flinch, but she does pause. Robin isn’t entirely sure whether he should count it as a win or not. “This is about  _ you, _ Damian,” she says, and that’s about when he stops listening altogether.

(It’s never been about him in his entire life. Not when she’s in the room.)

* * *

It’s day three before he starts to worry, and he isn’t even completely sure what he ought to be worrying  _ about. _

Jon might know where he is. His hearing isn’t as sharp as his father’s, but it’s a barely measurable difference. Talia could have figured out how to soundproof his prison against Kryptonians, this time—through magic or through science, Robin can’t hope to guess without actually being able to dig around.

So. Jon might know where he is, in which case it’s worrying that he hasn’t shown up to do something stupid yet; but he might not, in which case there’s no telling how long it’ll be before Robin’s family finds him or he just makes his own way out; or he might have already come, already done something stupid, and be trapped here too.

(He could be dead. It isn’t as though Talia has any tactical advantage to gain by telling Damian in that case.)

His family must already be looking for him, but all of the traditional means of tracking him down would have been taken with his gear; and although Robin would strongly consider microchipping himself after all of this, it hadn’t yet come up as anything more than a joke at the expense of Father’s paranoia. For all he knows, they  _ are _ tracking his suit, and it’s just being moved from place to place as bait.

For all he knows,  _ he’s _ being moved from place to place as bait. He hasn’t been able to feel any motion, but it could be dampened somehow, or so constant and ponderous as to be unnoticeable.

He could take most of his mother’s forces on singlehandedly, even if he began the task unarmed, but Talia herself could prove problematic. He’d prefer to leave that as a last resort, after he became absolutely sure that no one was coming for him in an acceptable timeframe.

(He’ll give it another day.)

* * *

When it does happen, there’s no warning. Robin is trying to dismantle the sink in the hopes of making a decent bludgeoning weapon out of the pipes when the ceiling in the other room explodes. He turns around as the lights flicker and spark and go out, leaving only a single central beam of sunshine from what’s left of the ceiling; he looks up and sees Jon bathed in holy light, eyes ablaze but heat vision carefully controlled, and he thinks…

It doesn’t matter what he thinks.

“What kept you?” he says instead, because it’s easier. His heartbeat is a lost cause, his viscera sliding sideways and trying to escape itself, and he  _ could  _ pass it off as just being surprised but they both know better than that now, don’t they?

“Oh,” Jon says, the scarlet fading from his eyes, “you know,” and then he abruptly stops hovering and lands unsteadily on his feet. “Crap.”

He doesn’t seem to be hurt, Damian informs himself before he has a chance to panic. “Kryptonite?” he asks.

Jon wrinkles his nose. “I don’t think so,” he says.

Good, because Jon isn’t and won’t be sick or in pain; bad, because at least Damian knows the symptoms of kryptonite. Magic is a different beast entirely, which is exactly why he’d use it himself if he had to. “Your rescue needs work,” Robin says dryly, squinting up into his new skylight and trying to figure out if he can just jump up there and climb through the several broken ceilings to freedom. Probably if he was on his own, but a depowered Superboy might make it a little harder.

“Good thing I’m not the rescue,” Jon says brightly; and, as perfectly as if he’d summoned it for dramatic effect, there’s the sharp metal silhouette of the Batwing passing over the sun. (And then the smaller metal silhouette of Batwing the person, who really could have chosen a different name.) “I brought everybody. Well—Batwoman’s still in Gotham and Dad is standing by until someone yells for him, but  _ basically  _ everybody.”

Robin pushes down the twist of preemptive, guilty worry before it has much of a chance to take root. (They’ve all fought his mother before, unfortunately. They’ve all… mostly come out the other side unscathed. They can take care of themselves, and it isn’t his fault if they fail.) “Good,” he says, heading back to the sink to finish twisting a length of pipe free. He heads for the door with purpose. “Keep an ear out while I take care of this.”

He doesn’t need to face Jon to know he’s rolling his eyes. “You’re welcome,” Jon says under his breath, a tiny smile in his voice. “I missed you too.”

Damian only lets himself grin back a little because he knows Jon can’t see it. “I know.”

And of course he can’t just sit quietly while Robin tries to break the lock or the door or the frame, because that just wouldn’t be right. “So… why now? I thought she’d given up on recruiting you back into her weird murder club.”

“The League of Assassins,” Damian corrects absently. He’d try just breaking the door down, but it opens inwards, and he’d rather not risk attacking anything too solid without his gear on him.

“Weird murder club,” Jon says.

Robin bites his tongue, momentarily giving up on subtlety and just trying to bash the damn thing apart. Which has the added benefit of making it very difficult for him to speak clearly, if Jon’s hearing has been taken out as well as his flight—

“I think someone’s out there, actually,” Jon says mildly, proving him wrong, just before there’s a cheerful pattern of knocks at the door.

Robin stands, readjusting his grip on his makeshift weapon. “Talia?” he asks.

“No.”

He takes a step back.

Jon hovers—metaphorically this time—at his side, their forearms barely touching. Damian does not react. “Come in?” Jon calls, with a tiny grin—

(and Damian wonders how on Earth Jon keeps his identity a secret, because the sun shines out of him every single time he smiles)

—and the door is summarily kicked in.

“Hey, kiddo,” Red Hood says, wandering forward, holstering one of his guns just to ruffle Damian’s hair. Damian ducks and scowls. “Wanna watch your stepmom murder your mom?”

Robin snorts. “Don’t get my hopes up, Todd.”

Beside him, Jon tries not to laugh and blessedly fails.

“How did you find me?” Robin asks instead of dwelling on that for too long.

The absurd mask doesn’t give away Todd’s expression (which is probably for the best; he has the worst poker face among them, somehow), but his tone sounds irritatingly amused. “For a kid raised by ninjas and then by ninjas, you can get pretty loud, you know that?”

“Stealth was unnecessary,” Robin replies. Helpfully, as if to prove his point, someone a few halls away screams in terror. (He can see Jon tensing out of the corner of his eye, as if preparing to fly over there and see what’s wrong, before he remembers that he can’t do that and the person making that sound deserves whatever is coming to them anyway. It isn’t one of  _ Damian’s  _ family.)

Red Hood snickers. “Whatever you say. I think Luke’s got your gear if you want it.”

Robin strongly considers saying he doesn’t need it—he’ll happily beat every assassin in the building half to death with whatever he can get his hands on at this point—but doing that while wearing his father’s colors feels like it would hurt Talia more. And, as much as he’ll deny it to anyone who presses the matter… right now, he wants to be petty. He can at least admit that to himself.

“Good,” he says. “Take me to him.”

Todd makes a small noise of irritation, or despair, or both. “Bossy,” he says, turning. “I knew I should have just left you in there. Ungrateful jerk.”

* * *

Fox is thankfully nearby; between Robin and Red Hood, Jon wasn’t in any  _ particular  _ danger, but Damian still wasn’t interested in having to protect him without any equipment other than a scavenged length of metal. Batwing chucks a nondescript (but bat-embossed) duffel and a cheerful greeting at them; Robin catches the first and ignores the second.

“Hey,” Jon says in his place. “How’s it going?”

“Could be worse,” Batwing says, apparently undaunted by Damian’s silence. “Not everybody gets to say they beat up a roomful of ninjas. You staying to help?”

Somewhere in a different hall, there’s a flash of something like firelight, a modulated voice like a well-trained Gregorian choir. They really did bring everyone they could, didn’t they? (Damian feels the rush of warmth, of gratitude, tightening in his chest; he doesn’t pay it any mind.) He opens the bag, gets to work peeling the outer layers of his useless clothing off and replacing it with his proper gear.

“Not right now,” Jon says, and he sounds almost guilty about it. “Talia took out my powers. It’s just magic,” he quickly reassures everyone who’s in range to listen, “so I’m okay, but I don’t think anybody wants me doing much.”

“Absolutely not,” Damian says, shrugging into his cape while he shoves his foot into one boot. No one else he loves gets hurt because of Talia; much less Jon.

Batwing, inexplicably, laughs at him. “Gotcha,” he says, sounding resolutely amused. “Let’s get you guys out of here. Azrael?”

Robin slips his comm back into his ear just in time to hear Valley’s voice come in.  _ “On my way.” _

The second the mask is back on, he feels something relax that had been wound tight inside him, so intrinsic and familiar that he hadn’t noticed its depth until it left. He finds himself twirling a batarang between his fingers just to reassure himself of its weight, the razor edge, the solid reality of it.

(He knows he’ll never truly be rid of her, not until she dies for good. He would hunt her down now, fracture his self-control for the second it would take to deal the death blow, steel himself through the grim preparations of destroying her corpse so thoroughly she can never be resurrected again, but—)

But Jon is still here. As much as Robin trusts his cohorts’ abilities, he can’t condone leaving Jon’s safety even in their care alone.

And, almost more importantly—Jon wouldn’t want him to kill anyone, not even a direct threat to him. So.

“The plane isn’t too far away,” Fox is saying. “Azrael can show you while I round up the rest of the team. And—hey, speak of the angel.”

Valley pauses in his approach to fix Batwing with a look. It’s impossible to tell just what kind of look under his mask, but his stance falters. There’s a sound through the modulator like a soft sigh from a hundred throats.

“Robin,” he says. “Are you hurt?”

Damian fights not to roll his eyes. “Do I look hurt?”

Azrael cuts an imposing figure, wisps of blood-red fabric and burnished armor and the constant slight scent of fire; Robin is prepared to admit that. He admits it, and meets the steady gaze behind the crimson mask, and does not falter at the sense that Valley is somehow seeing through every secret Damian has ever had.

“Not all wounds are physical,” he says in that canticle of a voice. “But I’m glad to see you in one piece.”

Damian’s eyes skate to the side as he scoffs quietly. He at least manages to redirect them to Jon, make it look intentional. “Of course I am,” he says, because he feels like he ought to be saying something.

Azrael doesn’t pursue the matter further. He gives Jon a small nod, turns to Batwing. “Where will you be?”

“Trying to herd everyone else your way,” Fox says. “Looked like I might have to drag Nightwing out by force. Looked pretty pissed the last time I saw him.”

Robin frowns, but Azrael nods silently. “Be careful,” he says, fingers at Fox’s elbow.

Neither mask permits much in the way of expression, but statistically speaking, Batwing is probably grinning. “Always am,” he says. He closes the distance enough for Azrael to lean down, rest the forehead of his cowl against Fox’s, the movement so synchronized it feels rehearsed.

Damian looks away, ribcage tightening for reasons he doesn’t particularly feel like examining at the moment.

* * *

They meet with resistance on the way out. Jon, thankfully, tries not to get involved; Azrael, even more thankfully, takes point, dispatching the first attacker just as he finishes murmuring a prayer. The second one doesn’t make it close to either one of his charges.

The third, Damian goes out of his way to reach; it’s perhaps not the most helpful way of dealing with the frustration of the past few days, but it still makes him feel better to fracture someone’s jaw against the wall and watch them crumple. More satisfying still is hamstringing the first assassin who gets within two steps of Superboy—and if it’s slightly more brutal than he tries to be these days… well, she shouldn’t have come so close to Jon, then.

“Having fun?” comes Selina’s voice from behind them, dryly amused. Robin whirls on her, purely instinctive (and maybe more off-balance than he wants to be by the whole ordeal), but the batarang doesn’t leave his hand.

“Not especially,” he says. “I thought you were with Mother.”

“I let your father have a turn,” she says, hovering behind Jon without looking like she’s being overtly protective. (Damian appreciates it, but only privately.) “I thought I could make myself more useful here.”

She doesn’t look like she’s just been fighting Talia al Ghul—but then, she rarely looks like she’s been fighting much of anybody even when she’s in the middle of it. Robin doesn’t ascribe too much meaning to that particular fact.

“Sorry,” Jon says, somehow sounding genuinely apologetic for being forced into baseline human statistics.

“Don’t be,” Catwoman says, ruffling his hair. “I’m here to keep Robin in line until you start being up to it again.”

Up ahead, someone falls in a flash of light. Selina spins, crushes someone’s throat between the wall and her boot before Robin can do much more than shove Jon behind himself.

They keep going.

* * *

As a general rule, Damian doesn’t like being in direct sunlight overmuch. It feels—wrong, somehow, after spending the majority of his life in the shadows for one reason or another; even apart from that, Gotham itself seems to reject the concept of a day that isn’t even slightly overcast. He deals with it when he has to, but it’s always felt unsafe, somehow. Exposing.

(Seeing Jon step out into the slanted rays, though, the lines of his face outlined in sunset, almost visibly drawing the light into himself and making it his—)

“How do you feel?” he asks.

Jon almost seems to startle, but there’s a smile pulling at his eyes when he looks down at Damian. “I’m pretty sure I could carry you home if you want,” he says, hovering experimentally for a moment. “ _ If  _ you want,” he repeats, eyes darting to Selina for a second. “I mean, it’d be faster…”

Selina grins a little too widely to look like she’s  _ not _ about to make fun of someone, but she restrains herself. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” she says.

Azrael and Jon are too polite to laugh. Robin snorts.

(He would have liked to call her Mother if the word meant anything good for him, could ever be redeemed by anyone. He wishes, sometimes, he could figure out a way to tell her that.)

“Thank you, Selina,” he says instead. She smiles like she knows what he means.

* * *

Jon is, as always, more gentle with Damian than he needs to be; but it’s not something that he’s going to complain about. He’d rather be carried like he’s about to break than still be stuck in there (or, indeed, than sitting in one of the planes with Jon flying home outside). He thinks for too long about how he normally sits when he’s this kind of passenger, where his arms are meant to go, his head; he can’t remember how not to just tuck himself against Superboy’s chest for something other than safety.

But if Jon notices, he doesn’t mention it. He doesn’t mention much of anything for most of the trip, just wordlessly using his own body as a windbreak as they start going fast enough to hurt him for real, not bothering to speak as long as the words wouldn’t even carry.

But they start slowing down eventually, just before the proper coast starts coming into view. And frankly, Damian is surprised it took that long.

“Why now?” Jon asks. “She left you alone for a while there, right? I thought she gave up.”

And there it is, the razorblade of a chill trickling under his skin. But there’s more than one way to face it, and it’s hardly the first bottomless pit Damian has found and looked down and thrown himself into. He’s certain it won’t be the last.

“I’m in love with you,” he says, and it’s out of his hands. Jon can act as he may.

Jon falters, dropping a couple of feet before he continues his even flight. His arms tighten just a fraction of a pound per square inch. “Uh,” he says. “You—I mean—I’m not sure what that has to do with her?” His voice cracks on the last syllable, pure confusion.

“Nothing,” Damian agrees. “She’s insane, Kent.”

He catalogs Jon’s reactions as closely as he can, the precise pressure of the fingers on Damian’s arm, the crook of the elbow tucked behind his ribs. It doesn’t tell him as much as he’d hope.

“I’m guessing this was what you were gonna talk to me about,” Jon says with a tiny laugh.

Damian exhales, but doesn’t otherwise answer. It feels too obvious a question.

“You know,” Jon says, his voice too carefully light to be conversational, “most people try going on at least one date first.”

Don’t overthink it. Jon isn’t the sort to dance around an issue like that, not if he had a real problem with it. Not if Damian has already been this honest. “You know me too well for that,” he says. “I don’t see the point in pretending it hasn’t progressed as far as it has.”

Jon gives an anxious little laugh. “Wow, Dami, that’s the most romantic thing anyone’s ever said to me,” he says. His voice sounds somehow both entirely flat and a little bit nervous.

“I’m not dismissing the matter out of hand,” Robin offers. “I only wanted to point out that I already know what you are to me. I don’t need to find out.”

Jon laughs, sweet and so quiet, into Damian’s hair as they approach one of the more awkward side entrances to the Cave. “You’re ridiculous,” he says.

“How so?” Robin tries very hard not to bristle. He also tries not to move at all—because while he trusts Jon completely, he would still rather not make it  _ easier _ to accidentally dash him to pieces on the Cave walls before they open up. The faded sunlight of a cloudy Gotham afternoon is abruptly swallowed up by rock.

“I’m pretty sure you’re overthinking this,” Jon says. “For the record, I wouldn’t mind dating you even if you don’t think there’s a point.”

Something inside Damian lurches in the opposite direction from how they’re flying. (Stupid. He knew that already—or he knew that at some point, but not quite if it was still true after these months, or—)

“There’s still a  _ point, _ ” Robin says as they touch down. “There just isn’t a point in pretending I don’t—that I’m not—already attached.”

He should let go. He’s on his feet, he’s steady; there may be fewer boundaries now, but he should definitely at least ask about them before he assumes any, and—

“Hey,” Jon says, hands having somehow migrated to Damian’s waist. He can’t feel the warmth of his friend’s—his partner’s—his ???’s skin through the body armor, but he can just barely feel the whisper of pressure.

“Yes?” Damian prompts, and then (it’s not all at once, it can’t be all at once, Jon wouldn’t use his speed for this and Robin would have seen him blurring or flickering if he had; it’s just that he doesn’t process it or understand it before it happens) Jon kisses him.

He freezes, fingers convulsively tightening on Jon’s elbows, his heartbeat doing absolutely unforgivable things. His old familiar mantra (don’t get too close, don’t let him get too close, don’t let him get hurt, don’t) fires up again, pounding in his head to the beat of his heart, but it’s—it’s okay, it must be okay, now, right? They’ve been over this. Jon was very…

He should be doing something. His mouth doesn’t feel like it belongs to him, and even without the peculiar separation between his body and what’s happening to it, he wouldn’t know what to do with it; but he can move his hands, skate one up to the nape of Jon’s neck, at least let him know in  _ some _ way that the lack of reaction doesn’t translate to lack of interest—

“Damian,” Jon says, half-mumbled into the kiss. Damian’s skin prickles. “Calm down.”

He can’t calm down. This changes—so many things, perhaps  _ everything, _ and it isn’t that he’s having second thoughts so much as just a wordless and relentless anxiety. This is all of it brand new.

“I am calm,” Damian answers, pulling back just in time to see Jon’s eyes before they open, the curve of his eyelashes above his cheekbones. Robin feels his chest lurch with something he can only liken to an obscure subset of despair.

Jon blinks his eyes open and grins. “Uh-huh,” he says. “You know it’s  _ super  _ hard to lie to me about that when I can hear you, right?” He fidgets, not quite pulling away but seeming to think about it. “Sorry,” he adds. “I know you probably could have used some warning there before I—”

Damian makes a vaguely argumentative sound, stretches up and kisses him back. He is enfolded, held close, Jon  _ finally _ not acting as though Damian will melt into smoke if he’s touched beyond the bare minimum; Damian’s fingers end up in Jon’s hair and he really should have taken his gauntlets off for this, but that’s something he’ll have to keep in mind for next time.

Jon nips him, but chases his mouth when Robin instinctively tries to disengage; pauses for a second, waiting for something or gauging the reaction or… something, and neither one of them pull away. Damian stands there, motionless.

Breathing each other’s air feels all at once ruthlessly inefficient and like it’s the only option available that he knows how to bear.

“I should go upstairs,” he says. “I need to sleep before I go out—”

“Before you what, now?” Jon answers, removing his forehead from its resting place against Damian’s. “You just got back, D. You can take the night off, geez.”

Robin wrinkles his nose, disentangling their limbs and starting to make his way to the shower-cum-locker-cum-changing room. “I just took the night off,” he says. “Several of them.”

Jon’s footsteps are almost silent as he follows, but not quite. “You were  _ kidnapped,” _ he protests. “You were being held hostage—”

“She didn’t make any demands of anyone but me.”

“— _ captive, _ fine. It doesn’t count.” He pauses for a second as Damian starts searching for civilian clothes. There’s a whisper of fabric on fabric as Jon shifts, but Damian doesn’t look to see what he’s doing. (Crossing his arms, probably. As if that would make him any more persuasive; Damian has been on the receiving end of Jon’s Disappointed Looks often enough that they don’t hold as much weight these days.) “I’ll tell Alfred.”

“Jon,” Robin says, sighing heavily. “We aren’t children anymore. Alfred’s retired, anyway.”

“He’s still  _ here, _ though,” Jon says. “And I’m pretty sure he can still boss you around.”

Damian shoots Jon a look—he was right about the arms—and doesn’t answer.

“Please?” Jon says, and something cracks.

Robin closes his eyes. “We’ll see.”

* * *

He does take that nap in the end, but it isn’t quite as planned as it could have been; he curls up on the couch to wait for the rest of his family to return, and Jon takes his rightful place at Damian’s side without comment. Alfred wanders in to check on him, insists he was going to make some tea anyway even though it’s a strange hour for it given his traditional pattern of behavior, and Damian is too tired and content to argue.

He drops off with the cup in his hands, awakens with it on the end-table, Jon having apparently moved it before curling as much of his body as possible around Damian. Jon’s face is slack, his skin warm, and Damian closes his eyes and bites his tongue through the instinctive bone-deep shuddering surge of  _ don’t think don’t look  _ because it’s okay. It’s okay.

Jon hasn’t made a habit of leading him wrong yet.

So Damian turns his head, tucks his nose into Jon’s neck, and—for once, in a reversal he can’t help but notice—lets that steady heartbeat lull him back to sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> many thanks as always to ProtoDan for his betawork and all of you for showing up and saying such lovely things <3 I really appreciate all of you ok


End file.
